You may not know this about me, but I’m a geek about weather. It’s not enough for me to simply check the daily or weekly forecast; no, I like to know what’s really going on, what are the trends, what’s happening in one part of the country versus another. My family knows perfectly well that if they ask me, “what’s the weather going to be like in the next couple of days?” I will likely give them a detailed answer about low-pressure systems versus high-pressure systems, troughing, the likelihood of convective activity, etc. I do this because a) I genuinely love this stuff; and b) I find it very funny to bore people with esoteric stuff that only I care about.
Here are my two favorite weather sites, Weather West (managed by a climate scientist, Daniel Swain, who rose to fame during California’s years-long drought from 2012 – 1016 and coined the phrase “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge,” referring to the high-pressure system that deflected each and every possibility for precipitation that Mother Nature threw our way back then) and the National Weather Service (which is powered by scientists and data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the federal agencies recently gutted by those malevolently stupid DOGE people).
One of the things I learned from the first resource I mentioned was the difference between climate and weather data. To put it simply, data on climate change is most often longitudinal in nature – data that is collected over a long period of time to understand changes that may be happening to our planet’s atmosphere and environment but are not verifiable day-to-day or week-to-week or month-to-month. These types of changes are best understood by analyzing the data for trends over a period of, say, years. The opposite of longitudinal data (which I did not know prior to writing this piece, btw) is cross-sectional data, which is essentially a snapshot of data from a fixed point in time, often from multiple sources. This is what powers your daily and 10-day forecast.
When I learned about this difference when it came to climate and weather data, this made a teeny-weeny light bulb turn on in my brain. You see, I had been getting slightly frustrated by all of the weather people saying things like, we’re having an “unusually hot” summer. To put it more simply, it was frustrating to have meteorologists say things like, “we’re seeing above-normal temperatures for this time of year,” which would make me shout at the television or at my devices, “What exactly do you mean by NORMAL, huh? What if these temps are our NEW NORMAL because of climate change, damn it!”
I now understand that this descriptor of “normal” is based on decades and decades of temperature records that were kept from many locations all over the world, and that now we have enough longitudinal data to show that we ARE approaching a new normal – the temps ARE unmistakably getting hotter each and every year. Even an anomalous year that aligns with trends from long ago, like the cool summer we’re currently having in Silicon Valley, doesn’t stand up to the years and years of longitudinal data we now have on our warming planet.
Why did I just offer up that long and boring explanation, you might ask? Because I think that our current information environment – our noisy, cacophonous, overcrowded, and polluted information environment – is tilting us away from longitudinal understanding and more towards cross-sectional understanding. We tend to believe the thing we were just told, rather than try to understand what’s happening over a longer period of time. I hope you all grasp why that’s a problem. Every single issue of vital importance to our lives and well-being – like wealth disparity, the state of our democracy, our environment, our fundamental rights and freedoms, and our healthcare and social services – is beset with problems that have become deeply entrenched over the years. These are not issues that one can solve with cross-sectional data or understanding. These are issues that require looking back at years and years of data to understand the root causes of the problems, and also longitudinal thinking (and imagination) to find ways to make things better.
Too much of our society, including our political system especially, is based on cross-sectional data that does not serve us very well in a polluted and noisy information environment. How much can I really learn about a political candidate based on the frenetic campaigning they do during a prescribed window of time? How much can I understand about what’s happening in international affairs if all I’m being fed are clickbait headlines based on one incident? When an article on something catches my eye lately, I have taken to doing my own background research on the topic to build my understanding of the historical context and also look for who’s doing what on a particular issue. I do this because I am thirsty for understanding and I am thirsty for positive change.
In my long career as a social sector communicator, I can tell you one thing: we usually wanted to get people engaged in long-term solutions, not short-term fights. And one of the ways we did that was to try and build longitudinal understanding – how did we get here, what is the problem with the way we are now, and what solutions are on the table and oh by the way, there are no silver bullets or overnight fixes?
My feeling is that we – as communicators, as advocates and activists – should be spending far more time in the building of understanding and less time on the ask of the day or even of the minute. This is a hard sell, I know. The MAGA Republicans, under Donald Trump, are really skillful at obfuscating true, deep understanding and honestly, I’m not sure what the appetite is of many Americans to build their longitudinal understanding. On one hand, you have commentators like Heather Cox Richardson and Amanda Nelson (both are findable on Substack and various social media platforms) who are building followings solely based on longitudinal understanding – what happened historically, what this means for what’s happening now. But on the other hand, you have people who are either overreacting to the latest non-issue of the day or blatantly spreading misinformation about current events. I am still absolutely astonished at how many people simply ignored or dismissed their long-term plan – Project 2025 – and chose to ignore the very real harm that would come of dismantling progress that had been years in the making.
The other reason that longitudinal thinking is a hard sell is because of our political cycle in America, which is viciously circumscribed and asks us to fight against every executive order, every piece of legislation, every atrocity that this Administration commits, and every local and state race, not to mention the midterms coming up in 2026. One can easily be put into a state of panic or despair about one’s ability to, you know, make a difference. This is where building longitudinal understanding really helps, I think. It helps people pick their battles and calm the eff down. It is no coincidence that I support independent journalists and organizations that can tell me something about the long game we’re playing and not just scream at me in panic that I have to do something, NOW.
The first Trump Administration really taught me something about the utility of my own despair and rage about injustice and inequality. My emotions were justified, based on the nonstop barrage of horrible things that were happening, but they did not help me function very well nor figure out how I could be part of the solution. The second Trump Administration, to me, feels more dangerous in a lot of ways because even though they’ve displayed astonishing levels of incompetence and corruption, they’re also playing a long game by trying to implement the specifics of Project 2025. But at the same time, I feel like a more seasoned consumer of news and information now. I feel stronger in my ability to know what’s what. At no point do I feel like, it’s all hopeless and we’re never going to get to a better place. My sifting/filtering mechanisms have become much sharper, and I wish that for you, too.
It is hard to tell, right now, what the longitudinal data will reveal on the impacts of this second Trump presidency, in part because there’s such a constant push-pull between the executive orders, many of which are blatantly unconstitutional and illegal, and the federal courts trying to curb or check these actions. But what I do know is that we should be thinking not only about what’s happening now, but what lies ahead. Here’s one tiny example: I would like to focus less on how pissed I am that so many establishment Democrats lined up to endorse a guy who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by 13 women for the mayor of New York City and MORE on the positive communications lessons offered by Mamdani’s campaign, which was all about addressing the things that have bothered a lot of people for a very long time. I would like there to be MORE candidates who are espousing longitudinal thinking and sharing ideas about things like healthcare, affordable housing, living wages, education, and income and racial inequality. Yes, Democrats and progressive candidates – and progressive organizations, too – should be clear about how they’re fighting back against MAGA. But they should also be pivoting, in their communications, to helping us understand what a better future might look like, with respect to the issues that so many of us still care about, deeply.
Minna Jung Consulting 